Berkeley Art Museum closes with performance, parade to new home

People danced as ceremonies celebrating the space were held. The UC Berkeley Art Museum is closing its doors on Bancroft Way and held a ceremony Sunday December 21, 2014. They will reopen late next year at a new sits on Oxford and Center Streets. less

People danced as ceremonies celebrating the space were held. The UC Berkeley Art Museum is closing its doors on Bancroft Way and held a ceremony Sunday December 21, 2014. They will reopen late next year at a ... more

Photo: Brant Ward / The Chronicle

Photo: Brant Ward / The Chronicle

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People danced as ceremonies celebrating the space were held. The UC Berkeley Art Museum is closing its doors on Bancroft Way and held a ceremony Sunday December 21, 2014. They will reopen late next year at a new sits on Oxford and Center Streets. less

People danced as ceremonies celebrating the space were held. The UC Berkeley Art Museum is closing its doors on Bancroft Way and held a ceremony Sunday December 21, 2014. They will reopen late next year at a ... more

Photo: Brant Ward / The Chronicle

Berkeley Art Museum closes with performance, parade to new home

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After 44 years of trying, they finally found a way to warm the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive on a Sunday afternoon — combine 600 people and 100 ticking metronomes on the concrete floor.

The tick-tick-ticking was like a time bomb in the old concrete bunker, and when the last one had wound down and quit, everybody fled the building for a New Orleans-style parade to the BAM/PFA’s new home in a printing plant at the more densely traveled west entrance to campus. It will open in early 2016 after a $112 million updo.

The farewell to the old place on the south side attracted 1,883 people, which is about 1,783 more than on an average day. Free admission all day Sunday helped, and so did a full day of programming and performance art, which as it turned out is what the drafty space was always best suited for. What it was not suited for was welcoming passersby to stop in for the visual arts.

“The exterior has always been a problem,” said Noel Nellis, chairman of the museum’s Board of Trustees. “A lot of students have walked by here for four years and never come inside.”

“People are the missing ingredient,” director Larry Rinder added as he looked down on a packed floor, then looked up on packed ramps and overlooks rising to the skylights. “Without people, this building is brutal. Brutalist, even.”

That style of architecture was always the knock on the place, but it was the main attraction for the Ardent Heavy Industries collective, a group of 12 from San Francisco who came on closing day just for the building.

“It’s one of the most breathtaking interiors I’ve ever seen,” said Nicole Aptekar, 31, an artist/engineer who has visited most of the major museums in the United States and Europe, before getting across the bay to Berkeley. “The way the light moves through here is epic.”

Aptekar had been here once, but a friend, photographer Nadya Lev, 32, had not. “I was like, 'Oh, my God, how come I’ve never seen this before?’” she said, while standing on the top tier.

“I’m sad to be saying goodbye. Especially since I just discovered it.”

A lot of people were, maybe more than regular attendance figures would have suggested, so composer Sarah Cahill conducted György Ligeti’s “Poème Symphonique” for 100 metronomes as “a lovely way to end. A lighthearted way to say goodbye.”

The little wooden timekeepers were calibrated to end in staggered fashion, so that by 5 p.m. there was just one left, hanging on. And when it stopped, director Rinder was out the door.

“I’ve always been sad to see it go,” he said, “but I feel we did as good a job as we could in saying goodbye.”

As soon as the doors were locked, he was ready to say “hello” to the new place. He grabbed a fake giraffe head and started hoisting it up and down like a drum major. On cue, a brass band gathered at the entryway banged into a rendition of “I’m Walking,” and that’s what they did, Rinder in the lead with his giraffe, and maybe 200 people marching behind.

They went down Bancroft, took a right at Sproul Plaza, a left at Sather Gate, down across Strawberry Creek and out the West Gate. Standing on the sidewalk at Center and Oxford streets, they lifted a toast of hot cider as spotlights played off the metal skeleton of what will become their new home, just up the block from the Downtown Berkeley BART Station. They took that clunky name with them — BAM/PFA.